Barone: Romney wins, handily

11/3/12 5:22 PM EST

Michael Barone, a senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner and co-author of the Almanac of American Politics, goes out on a limb and predicts victory for Mitt Romney – by a margin of nearly 100 electoral votes.

Fundamentals usually prevail in American elections. That's bad news for Barack Obama. True, Americans want to think well of their presidents and many think it would be bad if Americans were perceived as rejecting the first black president.

But it's also true that most voters oppose Obama's major policies and consider unsatisfactory the very sluggish economic recovery -- Friday's jobs report showed an unemployment uptick.

Also, both national and target state polls show that independents, voters who don't identify themselves as Democrats or Republicans, break for Romney.

That might not matter if Democrats outnumbered Republicans by 39 to 32 percent, as they did in the 2008 exit poll. But just about every indicator suggests that Republicans are more enthusiastic about voting -- and about their candidate -- than they were in 2008, and Democrats are less so…

Bottom line: Romney 315, Obama 223. That sounds high for Romney. But he could drop Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and still win the election. Fundamentals.

In Barone’s estimation, Romney essentially sweeps the swing states, with the exception of Nevada, and even picks up Pennsylvania.

Michael’s views have drifted rightward over the years and he's become a prominent conservative voice, so there will be a tendency among Democrats to dismiss his prediction. But having worked closely with him in the past — we worked together to produce three Almanacs – I'd argue that no one in the business has a greater command of the American political landscape than Barone.

Even so, I don’t see his sweep scenario playing out.

It’s not as implausible as it seems given the tightness of the battleground state map, but it’s contingent on the notion that most pollsters are fundamentally misreading the composition of the electorate -- I'm not there yet. His Ohio and New Hampshire arguments also feel a little unconvincing to me. And my sense is that Pennsylvania and Michigan will move in tandem – probably for Obama, but together in any case.